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Comment by wokwokwok | Hacker News Reader

I mean… fair, but is the 60MB runtime the issue?

I really don’t care if my hello world UI is 60MB to download, I care that it consumes 1 GB of my precious ram to run.

How is running js with a rust backend any better than running js with a C++ backend?

I guess your “backend” is rust here, which is nice (because I <3 rust), but tell me this won’t sit there guzzling all the memory it can get it’s hands on for the UI?

Ie. really, do you get meaningful benefits from using this over say, literally just using https://github.com/webview/webview?

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> I really don’t care if my hello world UI is 60MB to download

lot of people cares, they may have a slow connection, must pay per MB and so on.

There is no reason why hello world UI should be 60MB.

I can remember using 56k dialup and downloading ISOs around 650MB.

A 60MB download would have been fine.

Indeed, with the annoying habit of proprietary software to install "Download managers" that download the actual software, I would be happy for just a 60MB runtime for the actual program itself.

I'm not sure you really remember. With 56k dialup, downloading 650MB could easily take days. Downloading 1MB could have taken 3 to 4 minutes.

60MB, even today, is really big when you have to download it while boarding a train or with poor connectivity (even in rich countries, just being in a metallic building is enough for 60MB to be painful to download.

You download desktop apps while boarding a train?

I remember leaving the computer on to download 650MB overnight, which used to be an ISO for an operating system. It was usually finished sometime the next day.

And 60MB would have been a couple of hours, not bad to wait for some software.

It wasn't prohibitive to do this.

Indeed, I seem to be back at square one, as downloading a AAA game for me once again takes about a day.

650,000 kb / 5 kb/s = 36 hours

Add a little line noise for the average 30-70y/o house wiring and you get 43 hours for 33.6 or 50 hours for 28.8. It took running a brand new line in order for me to get 56k. So, the parent comment is accurate.

It was absolutely prohibitive for the average person with a shared line, and the direct comparison to shared line today is a metered connection. Even in the US it can be as much as $30 per gigabyte which would make that 60MB download cost $1.80.

I also remember using 56k dialup, and we paid per minute. A 60 Mb download would take several hours.

While true, you pay the price to download a program once, but the price to run the program, every day.

But you don’t pay RAM usage fees.

Don't give them any ideas.

You would be surprised but that is exactly what you do when you access VMs on clouds.

To be short: if you can make your app less greedy - do it.

In some cultures we have a concept of "engineering conscience" (ru: "инженерная совесть"). Are we loosing all that?

Oh sure, not just VM, but in all rented server instances. But we’re talking about home machines here.

Yes, but this is my point.

https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri/discussions/3162

> FabianLars, 3 hours ago, Collaborator

> ...for example my somewhat simple app uses ~120MB

> But only ~5MB is the actual tauri/rust process, the rest is WebView2.

So, if 60MB is a large download, surely a simple app using 120MB of ram is pretty outrageous too?

> There is no reason why hello world UI should be 60MB.

Absolutely, but you can't have everything. Fast. Small. Doesn't use any memory. Easy to develop for. Free. Consistent cross platform behaviour.

You can't have them all.

So... the question isn't "is 60MB ok?"

The question is: What do you care about the most? Is it really the download size?

It's not the download size for me.

I’d encourage you to rethink whether the “all” you describe is desirable. I couldn’t care less whether an app is consistent across platforms - in fact I consider that a strict negative since apps should be consistent with the platform on which they are running not with themselves on other platforms.

I don't think that "consistent" always necessarily refers to pixel-perfect equality. When using this term in web dev, most would refer to browser standards as in spacing, layout, JS apis, availability of native elements etc. In this context, consistency is rather the opposite of negative. I don't think anyone really cares about how date picker looks on Firefox vs. on Chrome.

Maybe you are referring to Gtk/Qt vs. win32 etc. with their integrations in the operating system. I agree that they look and feel the best for their respective OS, but eventually require you maintain multiple unrelated codebases. It is understandable and necessary for this approach to die. A middle ground would be best, say, Qt support on all existing platforms. Or more likely, prettier browser defaults for standard elements like lists and tables, with browsers themselves respecting the underlying OS theme. Probably never gonna happen...

I'm not that interested in using lower common denominator software on any platform - for my purposes I am only interested (and willing to pay for) software written to integrate with macOS in a first party manner. That means I want all of the accessibility controls to work, all of the system integration to work and so forth. I'd expect anyone serious about software to want the same on whatever platform they use. Lowest common denominator crap is the thing that needs to die.

Arguably both Slack and Spotify (and Visual Studio?) have reached significant scale with Electron apps - so at the end of the day it seems to be less of an issue for end consumers.

Spotify is built on Chromium Embedded Framework, not Electron. Common misunderstanding.

Lots of things are popular, but that doesn't imply quality. McDonald's does not make the best hamburger in the world.

Per https://github.com/Fournux/tauri-vs-electron it uses just 20 MB of ram on linux.

Why? I guess because webkit-gtk is less ram hungry than blink.

any idea why the memory usage difference on windows are very close but significantly different on linux?

WebView2 is chromium edge. This was the reason that I guessed webkit-gtk uses less ram than chromium.

ah, that makes sense. thanks

  > I really don’t care if my hello world UI is 60MB to download,

If you're writing Hello World for fun, then sure. But _I_ won't be using any of your software if it's that bloated. I'm not going to even complain to you about my internet connection or hard drive space or personal preferences. If you are not going to respect my resources as a dev, I will not use your software. Just like I won't ride with a cabbie who curses and cuts off other drivers.

How do you feel about video games that range hundreds of gigabytes?

Games with hundreds of GB are using high poly models and high res textures. The actual code segment of the game is much much less. This isn’t really the same.

Games at that size are not clocking in because of their models and textures. It's from use of lossless, uncompressed audio files, and shipping multiple language files.

The issue is most common on games that release on consoles, but also for ones that want to support older hardware: the audio formats they use are designed to minimize the amount of decompression necessary for play, and so reduce resource requirements in exchange for storage space.

i’ve not yet seen a sound sample above a few 100mb, uncompressed. however it’s quite common to see a source model, or even a cooked down version, can absolutely be above 1gb. sound, except soundtracks (mostly), are also reused whereas models are not usually. couple that with one of your reasons, supporting all possible resolutions (PC games are the big offender here), and i don’t see sound being a huge issue. you can also compress sound while in transit, textures will only compress so much. wavs/PCM compress quite well

I don't play video games, so I have no opinion of them. I actually do play Kerbal Space Program, though I think that it is a few hundred megabytes, certainly not even a single gigabyte.

1.9 GB on disk not including expansions.

https://www.gog.com/game/kerbal_space_program

In that case, I feel that I'm getting a decent experience for the size.

Would you argue the same for a 60 MB Hello, World application?

Depends, if someone presented a hello world example in unreal engine I would expect the binary to be larger than 60MB.

Fair point.

To download the zipped version of https://www.monsterwriter.app/ it needs 100MB. If I build an universal file (Intel and M1) it doubles in size.

I assume this to be a conversion killer. If you have to wait 10 min do download you loose interest in trying it out.

100MB in 10m is 166.7KB/s. I’m gonna go ahead and guess that most people have internet faster than that.

One can hope that the code of the engine will be shared across apps in memory, thanks to shared libraries, and that the engine itself will use shared things too, by virtue of being distributed with the OS.

... if you happen to run other browsers and apps using this WebKit / libwebkitgtk / webview.

and that embedded apps won't be obese frontend code with bazillion npm dependencies and a heavy, all too widespread framework, of course.

Hopefully, developers turning to Tauri will have some sensibility to lightness.

The code size is usually epsilon compared to the amounts that the JS heap, DOM, and JIT consume. These are not shareable.

It's got better memory stats than electron on the tests I saw..

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